The Fallacy of Generic Thinking March 4, 20225,561 words (~27 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology philosophy third-person Generic thinking is unquantified belief about large populations of individuals, a profound and terribly mistaken fallacy that has little use other than prejudice. This article discusses two kinds of generic thinking: generic generalizations and generic comparisons. The former is explored by way of prior academic research, and the latter is explored by way of numerical examples. A straightforward solution is proposed for both: beliefs about large numbers of individuals should be quantified. Read more »
How to Scrutinize a Statistic January 18, 202216,397 words (~81 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics second-person If you inquire into any issue you care about, you encounter statistics. This article is a primer for the practice of scrutinizing these statistics. It describes what sort of questions you should ask of a statistic, such as those pertaining to its provenance, its scope of inference, its practical significance, and when applicable, the estimation error associated with the statistic. Common fallacies in the presentation or interpretation of statistics are identified throughout the article, and no prerequisites are expected beyond mathematics at the secondary school level. Read more »
Category-Based Prejudice November 26, 20215,435 words (~27 minutes) Tags: fallacies third-person While prejudice can be criticized on moral grounds, this article criticizes prejudice as a form of reasoning. It begins by illustrating general principles of categorization by way of a visual and abstract example using geometric figures. These principles are that properties of a population are not properties of individuals and that categorization is arbitrary. The article goes on to criticize prejudice in the context of more concrete examples involving gender prejudice in hiring. Such criticism includes that prejudice is more costly, less accurate, and more ambiguous than direct measurement. Read more »
Anecdotes Are Not Evidence January 31, 20217,817 words (~39 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology third-person While alluding to valuable criticism, the maxim “anecdotes are not evidence” is insufficient to describe the evidentiary uses and misuses of anecdotes. This article elucidates the flaws of anecdotal evidence that preclude anecdotes from being informative regarding inferences about larger populations or about cause and effect. It goes on to explore valid uses of anecdotal evidence, such as in investigation of specific incidents, while advising – in light of the findings of psychology regarding the fallibility of memory – scrutiny of anecdotes even in cases in which they are useful. Read more »
Selection Bias and the Fallacy of Listing Examples December 7, 20203,328 words (~16 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics third-person Advocating a belief by finding some number of supporting examples and listing them is fallacious. The reason this practice is a fallacy is that the examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored. In this article, this fallacy is explored by way of contingency tables used in a thought experiment in which two variables are claimed to be associated, illustrating the lack of information gleaned from such a practice in a straightforward and quantitative way. Read more »
